Aimed at improving the gaming experience and increasing content creation capabilities, Intel has launched its first discrete GPUs in the Arc graphics product line for laptops. Desktop and workstation products are slated for later in the year.
“For decades, Intel has been a champion for PC platform innovation,” says Roger Chandler, vice-president and GM of the Graphics and Gaming Team at Intel. “We have delivered generations of CPUs that provide the computing horsepower for billions of people.
“We advanced connectivity through features like USB, Thunderbolt and WiFi. And in partnership with the PC ecosystem, we developed the ground-breaking PCI architecture and the Intel Evo platform, pushing the boundary for what mobile products can do.
Today, we are officially launching our Intel Arc graphics family for laptops, completing the Intel platform,” Chandler says.
He says Intel has partnered with top OEMs to co-engineer a lineup of laptops that feature new and improved gaming and content creation capabilities with Intel Arc graphics and 12th Gen Intel Core processors.
“Many new systems with Intel Arc 3 graphics will feature the Intel Evo platform’s trademark responsiveness, battery life and Wi-Fi 6 connectivity in thin-and-light form factors,” he says. “Laptops with Intel Arc 3 graphics offer enhanced 1080p gaming and advanced content creation, and those with Intel Arc 5 and Intel Arc 7 graphics will offer the same cutting-edge, content-creation capabilities coupled with increased graphics and computing performance.
“The first laptops with Intel Arc 3 GPUs are available to preorder now and will be followed by the more powerful designs with Intel Arc 5 and Intel Arc 7 graphics in early (US) summer.”
The foundation of products with Intel Arc A-Series GPUs and our platform-level approach to graphics innovation starts with its new Xe High Performance Graphics microarchitecture (Xe HPG), which is engineered for gamers and creators.
“We have packed a ton of great technology into Xe HPG, including powerful Xe-cores with Intel XMX AI engines, a graphics pipeline optimised for DirectX 12 Ultimate with hardware acceleration for ray tracing, the Xe Media Engine tuned to accelerate existing and future creator workloads and the Xe Display Engine ready for DisplayPort 2.0 UHBR10,” Chandler says.
He elaborates on further features:
Intel Xe Matrix Extensions (XMX) AI engines provide more compute capability for accelerating AI workloads. These AI engines have 16 times the compute to complete AI inferencing operations when compared to traditional GPU vector units, which can increase performance in productivity, gaming and creator applications.
Xe Super Sampling (XeSS) is our solution that leverages the power of Intel Arc graphics’ XMX AI-engines to deliver high-performance, AI-accelerated upscaling. XeSS is a novel upscaling technology that uses deep learning to synthesize images that are very close to the quality of native high-res rendering. XeSS is coming in the summer and will be supported on all products with Arc A-Series graphics.
Intel Arc A-Series GPUs are the first in the industry to offer full AV1 hardware acceleration, including both encode and decode, delivering faster video encode and higher quality streaming while consuming the same internet bandwidth. We’ve worked with industry partners to ensure that AV1 support is available today in many of the most popular media applications, with broader adoption expected this year. The AV1 codec will be a game changer for the future of video encoding and streaming.
We’ve integrated Intel Deep Link technologies to enable Intel Arc GPUs to work seamlessly with Intel CPUs and integrated graphics for a performance improvement across gaming, creating and streaming workloads. Intel Deep Link enables dynamic power sharing, intelligently distributing power across the platform to increase application performance up to 30% in creation and compute-intensive applications.1 With Hyper Encode and Hyper Compute, Deep Link allows multi-engine acceleration in transcoding and AI tasks. More details are available in our product fact sheet.
“Today marks the first step in our journey,” Chandler says. “You’ll see Intel Arc graphics continue to improve and evolve, with new features and an ever-expanding ecosystem coming throughout the year.”